Bombing suspect killed, uncle appeals to at-large nephew to give up

One of two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing is dead and a massive manhunt was underway Friday for the other, a 19-year-old native of Russia who graduated from high school in Cambridge, authorities said. The two men are brothers from Chechnya, and lived in the U.S. for several years. The suspect who was killed was id...

The Patriot Ledger, Quincy, MA

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Posted Apr. 19, 2013 at 12:01 AM
Updated Apr 19, 2013 at 7:08 PM

Posted Apr. 19, 2013 at 12:01 AM
Updated Apr 19, 2013 at 7:08 PM

» Social News

The two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing killed an MIT police officer and hurled explosives at police in a car chase and gun battle overnight that left one of them dead and his brother on the loose, authorities said Friday as thousands of officers swarmed the streets in a manhunt that all but paralyzed the Boston area.

Meanwhile, the uncle of the suspects, urged his 19-year-old nephew, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, to turn himself in Friday, saying he had brought shame to the family and the entire Chechen ethnicity.

“Yes, we’re ashamed. They’re the children of my brother,” Ruslan Tsarni told a throng of reporters outside his home in Montgomery Village, Md.

The suspects were identified by law enforcement officials and family members as Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, brothers from a Russian region near Chechnya, which has been plagued by an Islamic insurgency that has carried out deadly bombings. They lived near Boston and had been in the U.S. for about a decade, an uncle said.

“Dzhokhar, if you are alive, turn yourself in and ask for forgiveness from the victims, from the injured and from those who left,” Tsarni said, raising his voice.

Asked what he thought provoked the bombings, Tsarni said: “Being losers, hatred to those who were able to settle themselves. These are the only reasons I can imagine of. Anything else, anything else to do with religion, with Islam, it’s a fraud, it’s a fake.”

Pressed again toward the end of the impromptu interview, he said he was not calling his nephews losers. “I’m saying those who are able to make this atrocity are only losers.”

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a 26-year-old who had been known to the FBI as Suspect No. 1 and was seen in surveillance footage in a black baseball cap, was killed overnight, officials said. His brother, a 19-year-old college student who was dubbed Suspect No. 2 and was seen wearing a white, backward baseball cap in the images from Monday’s deadly bombing at the marathon finish line — escaped.

The law enforcement officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the unfolding case.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev graduated from Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School in 2011 and was named to the Greater Boston League All-Star wrestling team. The city of Cambridge listed Tsarnaev as among a few dozen high school seniors in 2011 awarded a $2,500 scholarship, according to the city’s web site.

Authorities in Boston suspended all mass transit and warned close to 1 million people in the entire city and some of its suburbs to stay indoors as the hunt for Suspect No. 2 went on. Businesses were asked not to open. People waiting at bus and subway stops were told to go home.

Authorities gave no details on how he escaped, but said he may have been in a Honda CRV that was found later in the morning in Boston.

Police said the two men are suspected of killing a Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer on the Cambridge campus late Thursday, and critically injuring a Transit Police officer in Watertown. The pair stole a Mercedes SUV at gunpoint and after about 30 minutes released the driver unharmed on Memorial Drive. The driver reportedly told police that the two men identified themselves as the marathon bombing suspects.

“We believe this man to be a terrorist,” said Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis. “We believe this to be a man who’s come here to kill people.”

The bombings on Monday killed three people and wounded more than 180 others, tearing off limbs in a spray of shrapnel and instantly raising the specter of another terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

Authorities have shed no light on the motive for the attack and have said it is unclear whether it was the work of domestic or international terrorists or someone else entirely with an unknown agenda.

The endgame — at least for Suspect No. 1 — came just hours after the FBI released photos and video of the two young men at the finish line and appealed to the public for help in identifying and capturing them. Tips came pouring in to the FBI immediately, but exactly how authorities managed to close in on the two was not immediately disclosed.

The men’s uncle, Ruslan Tsarni of Montgomery Village, Md., told The Associated Press that the brothers traveled here together from the Russian region near Chechnya.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was registered as a student at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, the school said. The campus closed down along with other colleges around the Boston area.

Their father, Anzor Tsarnaev, said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press from the Russian city of Makhachkala that his younger son, Dzhokhar, is “a true angel.”

He said his son was studying medicine. “He is such an intelligent boy. We expected him to come on holidays here,” the father said.

The images released by the FBI depict the two young men walking one behind the other near the finish line. Richard DesLauriers, FBI agent in charge in Boston, said Suspect No. 2 in the white hat was seen setting down a bag at the site of the second of two deadly explosions.

Authorities said surveillance tape recorded late Thursday showed Suspect No. 2 during a robbery of a convenience store in Cambridge, near the campus of MIT, where a university police officer — 26-year-old Sean Collier — was shot to death while responding to a report of a disturbance.

Page 3 of 4 - From there, authorities said, the two men carjacked a man in a Mercedes-Benz, keeping him with them in the car for half an hour before releasing him at a gas station in Cambridge. The man was not injured. Police said they suspected the brothers spent the night in a Honda CRV and used it to carjack the Mercedes.

They say one brother drove away in the CRV, and the other one drove away in the Mercedes.

Police say one then ditched the CRV and reunited with his brother in the Mercedes. Authorities say both suspects were in the Mercedes when they encountered police and hurled explosives at officers.

The search for the vehicle led to a chase that ended in Watertown, where authorities said the suspects threw explosive devices from the car and exchanged gunfire with police. A transit police officer was severely wounded, authorities said.

In Watertown, witnesses reported hearing multiple gunshots and explosions at about 1 a.m. today. Dozens of police officers and FBI agents went door to door this morning in a 20-block section of East Watertown and a helicopter circled overhead.

Sue Scheible, a Patriot Ledger reporter who lives in East Watertown, said she could see a long line of police vehicles streaming down Greenough Boulevard toward Boston at about 6:20 a.m.

Residents of Watertown received automated phone calls at about 2 a.m. today telling them not to leave their homes, keep their doors locked and not let anyone in. Later in the morning, residents of abutting communities, Newton, Waltham, Belmont, Cambridge and the Alston and Brighton neighborhoods of Boston, were asked to do the same and businesses were asked to remain closed. The MBTA, including all trains and buses, was shut down. Colleges throughout Greater Boston cancelled classes today.

Several courthouses and court offices in the towns shut down during the search for the surviving Boston Marathon bombing suspect have been closed for the day.

A spokeswoman for the Massachusetts court system says the courthouses in Cambridge, Newton, Waltham and the Boston neighborhood of Brighton are temporarily closed Friday until further notice.

The Supreme Judicial Court and the state Appeals Court and their offices are also closed.

In addition, all first day jurors summonsed to Suffolk Superior Court and Brooke Courthouses in Boston and for those in Middlesex County are excused.

State police spokesman David Procopio said, “The incident in Watertown did involve what we believe to be explosive devices possibly, potentially, being used against the police officers.”

Boston cab driver Imran Saif said he was standing on a street corner at a police barricade across from a diner when he heard an explosion.

Page 4 of 4 - “I heard a loud boom and then a rapid succession of pop, pop, pop,” he said. “It sounded like automatic weapons. And then I heard the second explosion.”

He said he could smell something burning and advanced to check it out but area residents at their windows yelled at him, “Hey, it’s gunfire! Don’t go that way!”

Doctors at a Boston hospital where Tamerlan Tsarnaev died said they treated a man with a possible blast injury and multiple gunshot wounds.

In the past, insurgents from Chechnya and neighboring restive provinces in the Caucasus have been involved in terror attacks in Moscow and other places in Russia.

Those raids included one in Moscow in October 2002 in which a group of Chechen militants took 800 people hostage and held them for two days before special forces stormed the building, killing all 41 Chechen hostage-takers. Also killed were 129 hostages, mostly from effects of narcotic gas Russian forces used to subdue the attackers.

Chechen insurgents also launched a 2004 hostage-taking raid in the southern Russian town of Beslan, where they took hundreds of hostages. The siege ended in a bloodbath two days later, with more than 330 people, about half of them children, killed.

Insurgents from Chechnya and other regions also have launched a long series of bombings in Moscow and other cities in Russia.